Forty-four-year-old David Jon Malloy was born in Pittsburgh, California, but moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in the 1970s. An intelligent, college-educated man, David had aspired to work as a librarian but settled for driving a taxi to make ends meet.
Sunday, March 17th, 1996 unfolded like any other work day. David clocked in at two p.m., ferrying fares through Vancouver’s bustling West End. By nine thirty p.m., he pulled up at the corner of Seymour and Robson streets, a vibrant nexus of bars, theaters, and late-night wanderers. There, he collected a passenger: a black man in his late twenties, sporting a goatee, glasses, and a white ball cap.
The man directed David north across the Burrard Inlet toward North Vancouver, a short but fateful drive. In the dim confines of the cab, the passenger turned violent. He stabbed David twenty-three times—seventeen wounds piercing his back—in a frenzied attack that left the driver slumped and bleeding. The assailant then rifled through David’s pockets, stealing his wallet, and shoved him out into an alley behind the 700 block of West 20th Street. Seizing the Yellow Cab, the killer sped off into the night.
At nine thirty-nine p.m., a 911 call pierced the quiet: witnesses had heard a vehicle revving in the alley, followed by a crash. They found David barely alive, conscious but in shock, sprawled amid puddles and shadows. “I’m a cab driver for Yellow,” he gasped to one bystander. “He stole my cab… robbed me… stabbed me.” He was able to give a description of his attacker to arriving North Vancouver RCMP officers.
Emergency responders rushed David to Lions Gate Hospital, where he clung to life for two agonizing days. The stab wounds to his back, neck, head, and left hand had triggered a stroke, however, and on March 19th, 1996, he succumbed to his injuries.
The description of David’s assailant had resulted in a “be-on-the-lookout” alert to police and cab companies across the Lower Mainland on the night of the incident. At nine forty-nine p.m., another Yellow Cab driver spotted the stolen vehicle eastbound on West Hastings Street in downtown Vancouver. He tailed it for blocks, catching a glimpse of the driver, who matched David’s account perfectly. He eventually lost the suspect in heavy traffic.
By a little past ten p.m., another Yellow Taxi employee located the vehicle abandoned at Dunlevy and Cordova streets, in Vancouver’s gritty Downtown Eastside. Forensic teams scoured it for clues—fingerprints, blood, fibers—but yielded nothing identifiable. Police released an artist’s composite sketch based on witness descriptions, but leads soon evaporated.
David’s death wasn’t just a personal tragedy; it ignited a reckoning for Vancouver’s taxi industry. In the weeks that followed, editorials in The Province and The Vancouver Sun demanded mandatory safety shields and GPS tracking—measures David himself had ironically resisted. Yellow Cab responded swiftly, investing $300,000 in a satellite-based global positioning system to pinpoint drivers in distress.
A week after David Malloy’s funeral, the West Coast Taxi Association posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Despite this, the case very quickly went cold, and the killer remains at large as of this writing in September 2025.
Crime Immemorial 